Improving landing page conversions by adjusting length

Jay is a digital marketer and producer whose creative and technical skills have developed digital brand strategies and sales campaigns using a range of complex internet applications from stand-alone websites through to Facebook API integrations.

If you practice Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) then you’re aware of the debate over small versus long landing pages and how it misses the point. At the end of the day, different products need different landing pages. A beautiful picture with a short description might work for a wristwatch but not so much for a $2,000 software product. Long and short landing pages both have their time and place, but what if it came down to more than the product? What if it also came down to the actual person looking at the page?

This disparity is explained in large part by the product. But it’s important to keep in mind another element at play: every audience consists of people who would prefer more information as well as people who would prefer less. This is precisely demonstrated by a recent study conducted at Brown University. The experiment found that there are two kinds of consumers: “explanation fiends,” who were more motivated to buy a product when they learned more about it, and “explanation foes” who were actually less willing to buy a product after learning more.

The study also discovered why these differences occurred. For both kinds of people, they were most likely to buy when they thought they knew the most about the product. It’s just that the more intuitive thinkers thought they understood the product much earlier on.

This is why long form landing pages are a double edged sword. For some people, they provide them the information they need to feel confident about their purchase. For others, they actually help people to realise they don’t understand the product as well as they thought they did, and end up swaying them away from a purchase.

So what can be done?

Targeting the Right Audience

A huge success factor here is the role and strategy of targeting. Research by Hubspot has found that businesses with over 40 landing pages generate twelve times as many leads as businesses with just 1 to 5 landing pages. Even businesses with between 31 and 40 landing pages still produce seven times as many leads. Here is the graph from Hubspot’s article:

To increase overall leads, you may want to test segments of your audience in order to determine which of them are more likely to respond to a short landing page, and which are more likely to respond to a long landing page. For example:

Test traffic source: Social media referrals may be more likely to respond to a short landing page than search engine referrals (or vice versa), for example.

Test ad copy: Different kinds of ads may attract different kinds of visitors.

Content interests: Among existing audience members, you may want to test segmenting them by their content interests and statistics.

Behavioral data: If you have access to the behavioral data of your existing audience, you may discover that visitors who spend less time on your site will be more persuaded by short landing pages than by lengthy ones.

Keyword: Whether you’re targeting specific keywords with SEO or PPC, there’s a good chance that some keywords will be searched for more often by “explanation fiends” and others more often by “explanation foes.” (refer to Brown University study). While I wouldn’t personally advise testing every possible combination of these, it’s worth testing at least a few keywords that are likely to indicate a difference.

*Remember: there is definitely more than one type of visitor. Some types of visitors will be more persuaded by a simple page while others will only be persuaded after learning as much as possible about the product. You can’t maximise your conversions with a single landing page. You need variouslanding pages, all of them uniquely suited to their targeted audiences, and the length of the ideal landing page is going to be different for all of them.

Why a Short Sales Page Is Ok

It’s important to understand that a short sales page can convert, but a “superficial” one cannot. What do I mean by this?

In the Brown University study, a common thread that all users shared was discovered: they were most likely to purchase when they felt that they understood the product the best. The difference is that the people who preferred short landing pages were intuitive thinkers. The added complexity of additional intellectual knowledge was, to them, superficial, and even confusing.

When they replaced their relatively short, informative page with an even shorter page with just a few bullet points and a smiling customer with her testimonial, their conversions went up by 103 percent. But when they expanded on that landing page, the additional information actually made it perform worse than the original.

What Went Wrong?

A quick analysis gives us the answer. The shorter landing page tells a simple story of a customer who is satisfied and smiling about the product, and adds a few simple actionable reasons to use the product. This is what an “explanation foe” is looking for. They want a simple and intuitive understanding of what the product is going to do for them, and how they’re going to feel after buying it.

The additional information, in contrast, isn’t nearly enough to satisfy an “explanation fiend” who would probably want to see screenshots and in depth discussion about how the product works.

At the same time, the larger page ruins the emotional connection that an “explanation foe” would have with the story in the shorter page. It throws additional testimonials and statistics into the mix, and adds more reasons to buy it, but these only complicate the overall message.

For a short landing page to be successful, it must be designed to appeal to the type of consumer who can be persuaded by it. These types of consumers aren’t looking for a list of objective reasons to buy the product. These are intuitive thinkers, and you must appeal to them on an intuitive level, with images, emotions, stories, and gut instincts.

In other words, to an “explanation foe,” lengthy landing pages with detailed knowledge are superficial, while short pages with emotional messages are superficial to “explanation fiends.” Neither is inherently superficial, as long as it’s intentionally created for the intended audience.

Making Long Form Work For You

By now it should be clear that the purpose of a long form landing page is to make sure that the visitor feels as informed as possible about the product so that they can feel justified in opening up their wallet.

This doesn’t mean that “explanation fiends” won’t be persuaded by stories or emotional and instinctual images and copy, but the science does strongly suggest that most of them won’t convert unless they also feel like they understand the product itself in depth.

This is the crucial thing to understand about long form landing pages: they are there to eliminate anxieties and confront objections with concrete information. In the Crazy Egg case study mentioned earlier, the optimisers based their new landing page on survey and heatmap data. Similarly, when Conversion Rate Experts helped SEOmoz (now known as Moz) boost sales by 52 percent, they surveyed paying customers, free trial members, members who had cancelled, and even recorded Rand Fishkin trying to sell the product in person.

This is the key that separates blind split testing from successful CRO

Designers can also appeal to both user-types by designing short landing pages, but including easily accessible, obvious product pages with all the information an “explanation fiend” will want to see before making a purchase. This fits well with “putting the user in control” after all, a basic tenet of design is usability.

Conclusion

If the purpose of your landing pages are to make sales or generate enquiries, it’s important to understand that there are two fundamentally different kinds of users visiting viewing them. Without targeted landing pages, testing, and an understanding of both of them, you will lose sales from visitors who would otherwise love to buy your products.

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